A recent musical experience of Enrique Arturo Diemecke, the composer and director of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, was similar to composing music for a movie when he produced "Libertad bajo palabra," a work inspired by the victory of the Mexican armed forces that stopped the advance of the French forces in Aztec territory in 1862 (eighteen sixty two).

(Napoleon III of France, pour poursuivre encore une fois la gloire militaire de sa famille parmi les français et montrer aux Mexicains la supérioriorité de la culture de liberte', fraternité et égalité de son pays, thought he could establish a French colony in Mexico because Lincoln in the Untied States was heavily occupied with the civil war of our country.

(Natually the French thought that the Mexicans would love them the way we believed that the people of Irak would love us after getting the opportunity to imitate our democratic superiority. [Just a minute. I think I'm gonna puke!]

(And naturally, according to the Monroe Doctrine, we believed that only our federal government had the right to screw the Mexicans, as President Polk demonstrated in our war against that country in 1845 [eighteen forty-five]. In a very simple variety of English the Monroe Doctrine states, "Europeans do not have the right to interfere in Latin American affairs. But WE do. Ha, ha, ha!" It seems to me that Chavez of Venezuela has other ideas, and I hope that his efforts will have the same success that Juarez had in his opposition to Napoleon III.)

"I composed 'Libertad bajo palabra' in only a few weeks," said Diemecke, "and I based my work on the history of this war and on a text written by [the director of the Latin-American Art Museum] Gregorio Luke on the battle of Puebla. I wrote the music while looking at these texts only as the source of the music itself.

The work was composed three years ago, for the commemoration of Cinco de Mayo and was performed for the first time on May 3 (the third), 2003 (two thousand three) in the museum itself. In Long Beach this year it will form a very important part of a series of events to celebrate this very important episode in the history of Mexico.